Faster Than Light

I no longer read the New Scientist regularly. How can anyone trust a magazine that promotes “consensus” yet claims to be about science?

However if a particle can travel faster than the speed of light, or even if scientists can contemplate the idea that this is possible, then the bizarre notion of science by consensus disappears rather rapidly.

Where are the articles demanding silence from the dissenters? Where are the scientists condemning this research, claiming it must be funded by some random special-interest group (which is, conversely, actually funding consensus research)? Where are the politicians, the socialist journalists, the polemicists condemning the very suggestion that neutrinos might travel at more than c?

Outrageous (updated)

This is everywhere, so I shall be brief. Really I am just registering my astonishment that the Guardian “newspaper” has been banned from reporting the proceedings of parliament. This is a genuine constitutional outrage, and should not have been even contemplated. Having been attempted it should not have been allowed. Guido adds the details that the Guardian is forced to omit, using his off-shore server privilege (the US has the freedom of speech stuff right).

The Trafigura case is a truly awful story, disgusting, basically down to killing black people for profit. They certainly should not be protected by our courts!

So who is going to stop Carter Fuck? They seem to be implicated in every disgusting cover-up (any law firm with a long-standing Private-Eye nickname is suspect).

Update: just to link to the Guardian's report on Trafigura. Thanks Speccie.

Update: gag order lifted, many are crediting a widespread internet campaign, on blogs and Twitter.

Mandelson the Imperialist Communist?

Did Peter Mandelson’s Communist ideology drive businessmen from Tanzania?

Abbreviated biographies of Peter Mandelson say that he went to Tanzania in the early 1970s (I think 1972) for a year. At the time he was a communist, but could a 19-year-old possibly have influenced government policy?

A few days ago I was talking to a businessman in an hotel bar, while I was away working. He was very intelligent, well-educated and widely-experienced. He asked about my work, and he quickly either knew or was able to grasp what I was talking about. He was also well-travelled, having lived in various countries.

This man was born in Tanzania, where he grew up and ran a business. He was well-off and had a good life, with several servants. However he also worked hard and earned his money, contributing to the local economy. Eventually he was forced to leave, sneaking out of the country, afraid even to be seen packing a suitcase in his car, car loaded with boxes of money for bribes, then left abandoned at the border, and he was relieved to get out safely.

He blames Peter Mandelson for the political changes that forced him to flee for his life. He said that Mandelson had gone in and advised the government on communist ideology – already by then thoroughly discredited and linked with tens of millions dead. He said this was widely known in that part of Africa at the time, and that the British High Commission had made him sign to say he would not write about his ordeal before he could receive assistance to leave Africa.

So, a few questions arise.

How true is this, and are there any more details to be found? A cursory internet search does not reveal any, but how widely known is this part of Mandelson’s life?

Why have the press not held Labour to account for this? The Guardian and BBC condemn Conservatives for working with Kaminski, the Polish MEP, for past connections with politicians who later became extremists, yet one of our own senior politicians, who has rather a lot of flaws anyway, was himself an extremist.

Communism has been the scourge of Africa. It destroyed healthy economies and was responsible for widespread famine, for wars and since Soviet support disappeared for failed states. If Lord Mandelson shares even slight blame for this then it should be known, for he has blood on his hands.

Entirely Predictable Consequences to Free Speech

I have written before about the unintended consequences, and the unspoken but intended consequences of laws, and especially of laws made in haste, made by an over-confident, bullying executive with a cowed legislative chamber or with weak or non-existent opposition.

The consequences of legislating against religious intolerance were not only predictable, they were widely predicted. Famously Rowan Atkinson and a few other comedians, making their living pointing out ridiculous pomposity of which religion can be a rich source, complained that such laws would be used to stifle entirely harmless and in fact important speech, including humour and debate.

Thus the charging of two Christians who are alleged to have argued with a Muslim guest should not be a surprise. It was not the stated intent of any law to criminalise entirely harmless disagreements, and the government at the time of the 2006 Religious Hatred Act’s progress denied that this would be the case. Worryingly the police did not even use this Act, although the same spirit is clear in the wording of the charges under the 1986 Public Order Act, an act intended to calm street disturbances, as being “religiously aggravated”. Are the police using the 2006 Act to guide their prosecution under the 1986 law, or are they making up the law as they go along? religious intolerance was not illegal in 1986, in fact I didn't think it was illegal now. Is this a generally accepted rider to a charge, and if so on what basis?

The Muslim woman in question might have been offended, but nowhere is it suggested she was threatened in any way. Where did anyone get the idea that a person has the right not to be offended? If freedom of speech is not the right to offend people then what is it? No-one objects to inoffensive speech, by its very nature, so its freedom need not be assured.

Incidentally I was reluctant to use the Daily Mail link above, due to the sometimes-justified reputation for over-the-top reporting, especially on this sort of issue. However after reading the Letter From A Tory about this my brief search only revealed one other national newspaper story. That was unsuitable because The Independent lied in the very first sentence that summarised the story, and lied in a way material to the events. Mr and Mrs Vogelenzang were not, as stated, charged with a racist offence.

Is the Independent simply incompetent? Does that incompetence show up some underlying tendency to see all politically-incorrect speech and action, from the most harmless to the most heinous as equivalent? Was this a deliberate attempt to make the Vogelenzangs look bad, and justify their arrest? It was at best farcical incompetence that should have been followed by a prominent apology and a sacking, at worst snide, disgusting, libellous dishonesty.

Remind You of Anyone?

It kind of reminds me of the New Labour spin machine. Although I always thought of Obama as a US Blair, this bit sounds more like the hyper-sensitivity some of Brown’s lot have shown, and the bullying of McBride, although they might have learnt from Campbell too.

Trouble Smuggling Underage Prostitutes?

An age-old problem we have all faced at some time or another

ACORN can help you there too. Yes, it’s another ACORN video from the professional US media a journalism student and a guy she met on Facebook.

This time the ACORN employee is a lawyer, and since he was educated in Mexico James O’Keefe wonders if he can help with getting his illegal immigrant child prostitutes across the border. What do you think?

Giles and O’Keefe have used an interesting tactic against the socialists who they knew would leap to the support of ACORN. They only released a single video at first, and at that time did not really give any clue that there were more. This then looks like something ACORN can contain, and they do. However this commits them to a line of defence and also to the fact that something is seriously wrong in the office in question.

A couple more videos, and ACORN has a problem but one they think they can handle, so they come out with stronger defences, further committing themselves to a strategy. There is a hint that more videos will come out, leaving ACORN unsure but also committed by their previous response to actually firm up their defence.

Then the east-coast videos start coming out, saying slightly different things and the defence is suddenly all over the place, with wild, utterly unconvincing stories.

It is a tactic I have occasionally tried to use against socialists, but not often successfully. Socialism is an incoherent, self-contradictory philosophy. With that to draw on the left so often shade their views depending on what they are responding to (hence they often come out as hypocrites, e.g. Islam, gay rights and women’s rights)that to argue successfully you need to make them commit early on, before your own argument is out.

Miss Giles, Mr O’Keefe, my hat is off to you. Well done sir, miss.

The Daily Show Takes On ACORN

I am not a big fan of the Daily Show, but that might just have changed. You really have to watch this video. Unlike many on the left, it seems that Jon Stewart really gets all the issues here, including the lack of response from the serious media. Oh, and it is very, very funny.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Much credit to Jon Stewart. I never thought I’d say that!

Hat duly tipped to A Blog For All Seasons.

Update: it appears the media are catching up. The LA Times even goes as far as “If ACORN is to survive and retain a shred of credibility, it needs to stop deflecting blame and clean house”. I would argue that it is beyond that and ACORN should be wound up, but it’s a good, solid position to take that can easily be justified.

Corruption in Left-Wing Pseudo Charity (updated 11:30 16/9)

There has been an undercurrent of grumbling about pseudo charities (non-profit organisations which are largely funded by government and use a significant proportion of those funds for political lobbying and campaigning) in the right-wing and especially in the libertarian blogosphere. Mostly the complaints are about political influence and the waste of tax-payers’ money.

In America they appear to have a problem that is at least a couple of orders of magnitude beyond that. ACORN (Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now) has been shown to have been willing to assist importation of children for the purpose of sexual slavery, for profit with the aim of political campaigning. Assistance went as far as advising how to buy a brothel and to cheat the taxes on the money earned, by claiming the child prostitutes as dependents. ACORN then requested a donation.

Really. I am not kidding. Tax evasion. Mortgage fraud. Children. Slavery. Sex. Selling actual children for sexual gratification. Then claiming tax benefits because they are children. Then using the money for a political campaign.

This happened in three different states. It could possibly be worse if they start advising on how to hide the bodies once they are too old to work, but I am not sure how else it could be. Yet there are rumours that the people exposing this have something devastating to release today. WTF?

To paraphrase the article linked above, once is a bad apple, twice is an unfortunate coincidence, thrice is systematic corruption resulting from policy.

There are two things that really strike me about the response to this.

Seven senators, six Democrat and one independent, voted to carry on funding ACORN.

This has not been a huge international news story; even in the US it has been remarkably quiet. Below is what the BBC considers to be world news and Americas news at 14:00 today (click to enlarge World News).

ACORN is an organisation that has strong connections with Barack Obama which looked like having significant political influence with the Democrats in power. They were at one-time a client of Obama’s. They helped elect him, in many cases breaking electoral law, in other alleged cases breaking employment law. He had arranged for them to work on the national census (risking a constitutional challenge, which should be a big deal to a former constitutional law professor). He had arranged for them to be in the stream for government funding that was potentially to total several billion dollars.

Is Patrick Swayze’s sad but not unexpected demise really more newsworthy? Is the entirely predictable anger of Islamic fascists really more important for us to know about than a charity supporting child sexual slavery in the USA? Can you imagine the headlines if Halliburton or any other organisation with real or alleged connections with Bush had been caught on tape giving illegal advice? Three times.

Update: note I did not mention which party’s candidate ACORN thought would gain from political donations they were advising on the laundering of. Do I need to?

Update: a fourth video has been released, of a similar nature, filmed in California. It’s a good one though, naming politicians, ACORN employee offering to kill anyone exposing the brothel, suggesting violence against the underage girl, admitting killing her husband. It’s … wow, just watch it.

One ellipsis here hints at more videos to come …

Oh, and it appears that Acorn was breaking the law even operating in Maryland where the first video was shot.

Update: Hot Air has more on the embarrassed silence of the media.

Update: The co-founder of ACORN Wade Rathke, has responded, claiming that this is a “…fake issue”. My response warranted a new post …

Thanks to Instapundit for some of the links.

Perhaps Children Really Are Smarter

A lesson in the dynamics of media response to protest

At least in the case of Marcus the sheep, the children seem to have more sense than the adults responding to the story. The most satisfying aspect is that the children seem to have learnt the intended lesson, about the origin of their food. I suspect some will also have a better idea of collective decision-making and even of media hype.

The last of these is of course where the evidence that the children are more intelligent or more aware than adults educated years ago breaks down.

Media hypes a self-selecting group of activists. People who support or accept the children’s decision do not make any fuss. This must be borne in mind when reading about any protest; the media coverage can be dominated by a self-selected few. Once the story is out there is social pressure not to be seen to disagree.

With the “overwhelming majority” of the children at the school who had a say in the fate of Marcus favouring selling him for meat I strongly suspect the same is true of adults reading the story. Even of those that would have chosen differently themselves it seems likely that many would support the children’s decision. That is, however, completely irrelevant in how the story is presented. Only the adults who object to Marcus’s slaughter matter, because the story is about them, not about the sheep.

Is there a term ‘meta-irony’, for describing the fact that ironical satirist Paul O’Grady fails to see irony in campaigning to save a sheep from slaughter when the idea of the project was to teach the children about the origins of food, and the result of the open vote shows the success of that project?

Left-Wing News Agency Plumbs New Depths

The Associated Press is known to among the self-described 'anti-war' when it comes to combatting regimes that support terror against the West and Israel. Of course those are often described by their political opponents as 'not ant-war, just on the other side', and the Associate Press has a case to answer.

That biased position is the background of a shocking decision that AP made to distribute the photograph of dying US Marine (photograph NOT shown at the link; I have not seen it), Lance Corporal Joshua M Bernard against not only common decency but the express wishes of Lance Corporal Bernard's family. It is an absolute disgrace that a news agency will use such tactics, for which I cannot see any other reason than to leach support for the war in Afghanistan.

There are reasoned arguments that the Iraq war was unnecessary, event that it was wrong. I don't agree with them, I think they are naïve, but there is a case that can be made. I can see no reasoned argument against the decision to go to war in Afghanistan. A private military force allied to and protected by the Afghan government and working from Afghanistan attacked the USA. That was by any definition an act of war. The only way that the anti-war lobby can damage the war effort, and help the terrorists with whom they sympathise is by sapping morale at home. That cannot be done by reason so it is done in this underhand, nasty fashion.

This has infuriated the military, not only because it is a disgraceful indignity on one of their own. The military support the campaign in Afghanistan. The complaints they make are about the conduct and the equipment, not the fact of their presence. From what I gather down to the front-line soldiers they feel the need to be there, but just want support from home. The AP is deliberately setting out to destroy that support.

Update: it appears that the publication of that picture also violated AP's embed agreement.

TV Documentary Lies To Steal Presidential Election

No it was not Obama’s election, in fact they were not successful. However Bernie Goldberg has further proof that CBS deliberately lied to try and influence the close Presidential race in 2004.

It has long been known that Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS documentary programme 60 minutes that seemed to show a senior officer’s criticism of a young Lieutenant G W Bush, suggest that he went absent without leave and support accusations that he failed to fulfil his obligations to the Air National Guard. The accusation was that he was a slacker, who was trying to avoid being drafted to Vietnam by joining the ANG and avoiding duties where possible, protected by his father in the Senate.

Of course it turned out that the documents were fake, and there the story ends for most of the news media, an embarrassment brushed over.

Well it turns out that not only did Lt Bush not shirk his duties, not only did he specifically volunteer to go to Vietnam (others with more experience were chosen instead), but that Mary Mapes, the producer of that episode of 60 Minutes, knew at the time it was made that he had volunteered. She had been told on more than one occasion.

This is really very serious.

I was no Bush supporter (although knowing more now I am relieved Gore and Kerry lost) but neither did I ever subscribe to the ridiculous ‘idiot’ or ‘Hitler’ memes. It was always known that election was close, and Vietnam was important. The media painted Kerry as a hero to help his cause (although his record was suspect while he was there, and he told lies about atrocities once he returned).

The Democrats were trying to paint Bush as a coward to contrast, and the 60 Minute episode was widely quoted in the press to support that; it could easily have changed the election result. Mary Mapes was a known ‘liberal’ as the Americans put it. It appears she produced a programme that she knew all along was advancing a lie, in order to influence an election. That is shocking, even for the modern news media.

What is even more widely relevant is that this information has been available for several years, and the US news media do not want to know. They will not tell the truth.

Background For Those Unfamiliar

This incident brought Charles Johnson’s Little Green Football (UPDATE: link removed as Charles Johnson has descended into insanity, and I am not willing to direct people to his creepy blog) libertarian blog to national (and to some degree international) media attention, when he challenged the documents and proved that the document below, dated 1973, was almost certainly produced on Microsoft Word (the animation compares the 60 Minutes fax, and identical wording written in Word with default fonts and paragraph settings), and could not have been written on any known typewriter available in 1973.

How Sick Can They Get?

I am not sure how to put this, as it is … stunningly crass. Ace of Spades is reporting an NRO post that a writer at the left-wing Huffington Post has said of Senator Ted Kennedy’s career that Mary Jo Kopechne would “… [maybe] feel it was worth it”.

There goes the left again; I said Senator Kennedy had plumbed the depths and continued on for fathoms, then less than four hours later those left manage to go even further than their mentor. Even I, who have few illusions about socialists often being unpleasant and self-righteous people, am truly stunned by this.

How Far is Andy Burnham from Reality?

Andy Burnham has written a ridiculous article called ‘Defending the N in NHS’ for the Guardian. Personally I think we should defend the ‘H’ and the ‘S’ in NHS; screw the ‘N’.

In today’s Spectator Coffeehouse David Blackburn writes a well-considered attack on Andy Burnham’s Guardian article. I would go far further than Mr Blackburn. I think that the piece shows Andy Burnham is deluded or dishonest at best, seriously detached from reality at worst. He writes,

“…the Tories would scrap Labour's three flagship waiting targets: 18 weeks, four-hour A&E and the two-week cancer target. Removal of these … would inevitably see a loss of public accountability and a return to postcode variation”

Forget that waiting four hours in A&E is not really acceptable, and read the letters page in today’s Telegraph. From Mr William Standish of Ormskirk,

“… referred by my GP to be investigated for possible prostate cancer … the earliest date available being five weeks later. I then went on holiday to France.

…

When we arrived home there were three letters. The first cancelled my June appointment. The second gave a July appointment. The third cancelled the July appointment. Three weeks later, I received a fourth letter saying I had to apply all over again to get an appointment”

So I suspect that Mr Standish, for one, is unlikely to be concerned about the removal of the two-week target. It does not appear to have done him any good. Public accountability seems to be conspicuous by its absence, and unless patients in all areas have to wait over two months for an appointment (rather defeating the object of a two-week target) the postcode variation never quite went away.

Of course a single case does not show a universal standard, but it does show that nothing else can be a universal standard. The only point to Mr Burnham’s great concentration on the ‘N’, apart from socialist dogma, is to get consistent standards for everyone. So this one case does show that Mr Burnham is deluded or dishonest.

Iain Dale pointed out on Friday that Andy Burnham was claiming the NHS had no waiting lists. Mr Dale also pointed out that this delusion was a bigger story than anything Daniel Hannan could say. Unfortunately the press never quite got the hang of treating Labour as the government, or holding them to even the same standards as the Conservatives.

Independent Prattle

It is the silly season, and the Independent on Sunday is taking the opportunity to dig well into the Conservatives. Of course the story is quite without news value, as Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home explains. After all what possible relevance does the value of accrued wealth of those benefactors have? It is hardly as if a member working in an Essex car plant is going to donate a flight to Mr Cameron.

The most ironic comment in the article in the article is that this destroys Mr Cameron’s environmental claims. The Independent’s view that ‘global warming’ (or ‘climate change’ since there have been no sunspots for 36 days, so obviously CO2 no longer traps heat as we contemplate lighting the fire in August) is the most important environmental issue. Perhaps they might have bothered to investigate a little further. Maybe looked at the website of the company run by the Henry Lawson who gave Mr Cameron more flights than any other donor. It is Henfield Lodge Aviation, a ‘carbon-neutral’ aviation company.

I actually saw Cameron being walked out to one of the flights marked on the Indie’s silly little map. He waved at me. He was walking to a Beech 200 Kingair. This is a small turboprop, a very modest aircraft. I knew where he was going (any other transport would have been impractical), and as an aviation professional I can say not only that it was exactly the right aircraft for the job but also that most customers would have demanded a jet.

Oh, and fire your subeditors, Independent on Sunday. “Where David Cameron Has Been Flown For Free” is not only a horribly-written headline that sounds childish, it is grammatically incorrect.

No Secret, No Revelation

The Daily Telegraph has a story today headed “Senior Tories' links with Republican NHS-bashers revealed”, or should I say ‘non-story’ because it says nothing of any substance at all. The headline is pure propaganda.

Not only is the article about Atlantic Bridge, a political discussion group that does not appear to be secret, so it is hard to see why the headline claims to ‘reveal’ the links, but there is not even any attempt to claim that the Conservative politicians involved even discussed healthcare with the American members of the group, let alone agreed with their dislike of socialized medicine.

The only British politician mentioned talking health with the Republican members of the group was Daniel Hannan, and his views openly expressed and coherently argued on US television are hardly a revelation [update: it appears to be that Fox’s editing misrepresented even Hannan’s views. The media do not stand up well]. I agree with him, but there is no evidence that any top-rank Conservatives do.

Why will “… the views of Mr Campbell and others … raise eyebrows …”? They are mainstream views in the USA. They are only considered so controversial this side of the Atlantic because of left-wing hysteria at any mention of the NHS closing down the debate. News media such as the Telegraph should be resisting this hysteria, and allowing a more mature discussion.

It seems that while the country distances itself from Labour the Telegraph is moving ever closer, and this story in particular is poor journalism.

The NHS and Professor Hawking

There has been a huge fuss in parts of the US left-wing blogosphere and commentariat after a dumb comment in Investor’s Business Daily, suggesting that Stephen Hawking would not have survived under the NHS. For those Americans not especially familiar with scientific academia it is an understandable error – he ‘speaks’, after all, with an American accent (which he chose to keep when offered a new English-accented speech synthesiser, as he by then identified with that voice).

It seems some of the howling criticism is far more flawed than the original article, which at least had a valid point despite the erroneous example.

Hawking himself, an old leftie, makes a ridiculously claim that he “... wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS”, but no apparent attempt to justify that assumption.

Ezra Klein claims that the IBD was telling lies, a truly inane suggestion; if they had known Hawking was British then they would never have published the article. It is not as if there was any chance of the error slipping by unnoticed!

Yes, the article does over-simplify the calculation NICE makes of the value of extended life or improvement in quality of life. However nuanced it might be, that calculation is still made, and the monetary figure given is roughly correct. The inclusion or exclusion of nursing care is irrelevant to those whose life (or quality of life) is dependent on drugs or surgery, and they pay the same into the system. Who is to say they should suffer?

The wonderfully-named (and it appears otherwise sensible) Donklephant* suggests that talk of rationing is an intellectually-bankrupt scare tactic. Here is where my tale is told.

I was earning in total roughly £4-6000 below average wage (depending on weather, luck and economics). I was employed part-time, paid for time I worked, so I could also work self-employed in other capacities. Therefore I was only paid as and when I worked, and simply could not afford to take time off.

I hurt my back. I could not physically work more than an hour or two in my employment, and legally was unable to work at all in the role I was hired for self-employed. I had a choice, which was to wait six weeks to see a consultant, then an indeterminate time (by previous experience a modest three weeks in that area of the country, but no guarantee) for physiotherapy, or pay for a consultation and physio, a total the thick end of £500, which I did not have spare.

Of course I paid; what did you think, I could afford to drop my pay by 70% for a couple of months?

What is that but rationing? Waiting is still rationing, whether the patients rationed out of play recover without treatment, give up and accept chronic illness, pay for private care or die. That is still rationing.

The final insult was the VAT on part of my bill (I needed an assessment to prove I could do my job, and although treatment is VAT-free that was not), 17.5% going to pay for people paid more than I to receive healthcare I could not have.

This might be only one example, but in order to destroy the entire left-wing basis of the NHS there is only need of one counter-example. How can anyone possibly justify charging me tax to pay for the NHS under those circumstances?

*Donkey = Democrat, Elephant = Republican, for those less familiar with US politics.

Update: the Telegraph has an excellent article on the NHS with reference to US healthcare.

Not All Racists are White

This article in the Statesman about an incident in Austin has one interesting line, and the inanity of that line is skirted round, even while the article implicitly contradicts it.

Police have not classified this incident as a hate crime, said Austin Police Sgt. Richard Stresing, because hate crimes target an individual specifically because of an identifying characteristic, like race.

So it appears that Sgt Stresing does not consider a brick bearing the message “Keep Eastside Black. Keep Eastside Strong” thrown through the window of a young white child to “target an individual specifically because of … race”. That decision by the police is itself racist. The Statesman does not seem to criticise the decision, even while it continues with a discussion on hate crime, implying the reporter believed this to be a hate crime. The same happens in the UK of course, when a Muslim ‘randomly’ stabs two Jews.

Note that I do not like the labelling of hate crimes, but if police do it they must not discriminate in their labelling due to the race or religion of the perpetrator.

I have already mentioned a case of white workers being sacked in favour of less-capable blacks in the USA; in the same post I mentioned a black friend’s experience of his black friends’ racist opinion on racism.

President Obama and his friend, Professor Gates, both seem to have made assumptions about a police officer due to the colour of his skin. The fact that those assumptions appear to be incorrect (the officer in question is unlikely to treat blacks and whites significantly differently, as he was specially chosen to teach a course about racially profiling) is not really relevant. It was a racist assumption.

Years ago a friend of my sister’s was murdered. He was white, and he was killed by one of a small group of youths who were not white (their race is irrelevant). It happened within a couple of years of Stephen Lawrence being killed. Yet there was no national news coverage, even when the actual perpetrator was being hunted, even when it turned out that he had left the country to the homeland of his parents. He was a youth, almost certainly without the means to escape himself. So there was a strong suggestion of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, probably within his family or his community. Yet the media had no interest. The media that still have not stopped talking about Stephen Lawrence.

As I said before, the race/equality industry has had a role, but now there are better ways of dealing with racism. The acceptance of racism by non-whites while (rightly) condemning racism by whites is one of the failures of the equality industry. It is a very dangerous situation, which will stoke future tensions and encourage white racists. The traditional media are not helping much, and sometimes neither are the police.

BBC Misleading on Honduras

Last night I watched a small part of the BBC’s coverage of Zelaya’s childish jumping back and forth across the border in Honduras. The talk about the pro-Zelaya protests was irritating as I have seen nothing about the far greater anti-Zelaya protests.

However the worst piece of bias was in the commentary about international response. The presenter stated that the “international community” has claimed Zelaya’s removal as president was illegal. However the international community has no jurisdiction. They have absolutely no right to decide whether the removal was legal or not. The BBC of course completely failed to mention what the Honduras Supreme Court said about the issue. They do have jurisdiction, and they were the ones that ordered Zelaya’s removal.

BBC reporting fails yet again when it comes to totalitarian socialists.

Anti-Obama Protest – in Honduras

OK, so it is not simply against Obama, but against foreign interference in Honduran political affairs. However Obama is probably the key target; externally only Chavez is likely to be as important as Obama to the future of democracy in Honduras, and he is unlikely to pay any attention to what Hondurans actually want.

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit is quite rightly critical of AFP for a story that describes a march of “hundreds” of people. While not a lie, it is far less informative than “thousands” or even I suspect “tens of thousands”, looking at the photo in the first link I gave, which Glen also uses. Ironically that is an AFP image! Most of the commercial news media really should be embarrassed by their coverage of Honduras over the last month.

Honduras Referendum Results

It has been reported in a Catalan newspaper (link is to an English-language blog post with a translation) that a computer seized in the Presidential Palace in Honduras contains the result of the referendum to change the constitution. The referendum was to allow the President to serve more than one term, which is banned by the current constitution. The results in the computer file was in favour of the change.

Of course the referendum was never held, so if this is true then Zelaya’s corruption goes deeper than previously reported, and will be better understood by those unaware of the Honduras Constitution.

The English-speaking media are behind on this. The Independent has even been spouting pro-Zelaya, pro-Chavez lies in the last couple of hours. The piece gets a unanimous pounding in the comments.

Hat tip Instapundit for the article and Maria in Honduras writing in comments in the Indie article for the video.